ADVANCEMENT OF THE PRACTICE
Open Access
BUILDING CAPACITY
Building Capacity Using Voice-to-Text
Darryl Booth, MBA
guess the context and punctuation, not just the literal sounds. How Do I Try It? Most modern devices have voice-to-text. You just have to know how to activate it. On iPhones and Android phones, any place you can type in words and you will see a microphone icon (Photo 1). Tap the micro- phone and then start talking. Tap the micro- phone again to stop listening.
Editor’s Note: A need exists within environmental health agencies to increase their capacity to perform in an environment of diminishing resources. With limited resources and increasing demands, we need to seek new approaches to the practice of environmental health. Acutely aware of these challenges, the Journal publishes the Building Capacity column to educate, reinforce, and build on successes within the profession using technology to improve eciency and extend the impact of environmental health agencies. Column contributors are guest authors. The conclusions of this column are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views or policies of NEHA. Darryl Booth has been monitoring regulatory and data tracking needs of environmental public health agencies for over 20 years. He is the manager of U.S. operations for Hedgerow Software.
“ Computer,” says Mr. Spock. Immedi- ately, the Enterprise’s omnipresent ship computer responds, never misunder- standing and never wasting words. I type quickly, but there is nothing more tedious than watching somebody else type, especially when they struggle (as we all struggle sometimes). And so, when I give a presentation about artificial intelligence (AI) for environmental health regulators or field inspection software, I either copy and paste prepared prompts or use voice-to-text. Invariably, the voice-to-text captures the imagination of my audience. While voice-to-text improves all the time, it is still imperfect. For this audience, back- ground noise chips away at the value. A busy oce or a loud kitchen really makes voice-
to-text unusable. Because, as we all know, it is extremely frustrating and time-consuming to fix (or worse, accidentally overlook) voice- to-text errors. I suppose there is a reason that keyboards reign supreme. Do not give up, though. We have techniques to maximize the benefits and capabilities. How Does It Work? Under the hood, there is a lot of technology— mostly AI—doing the heavy lifting. When you speak, your device captures the audio, breaking your voice down into digital sound waves. That audio file is transmitted to the cloud, which feeds into AI models trained on millions of voices and accents. These models slice, dice, and interpret what you said, trans- lating sound into words and even trying to
Photo 1. Example of a smartphone keyboard with the microphone icon in the top right corner for voice-to-text. Photo courtesy of Kristen Ruby-Cisneros, NEHA. On Windows, you might have to enable the capability through the Accessibility Settings option (Photo 2). Here are the steps to enable and use this feature on your Windows 10 or 11 computers:
1. Open Accessibility Settings 2. Enable speech recognition
Once speech recognition is enabled, you can use voice-to-text in any application where you can type, such as Notepad, Word, email, or even your inspection software.
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Volume 88 • Number 1
https://doi.org/10.70387/001c.142103
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